The Scare Salon

So Mark Higbie (Tony Franciosa) is a private investigator who runs a low rent operation along with his assistant who is known only as “Flaps” for reasons that are (probably rightfully) never explained. Flaps, by the way, is a mouthy hoot of a character, and she’s played by Roz Kelly, otherwise known as Pinky Tuscadero from Happy Days! Told you it was an amazing cast.

Just as an aside, there’s a running gag about the landlord of the building where Mark’s office is (played by Sid Caesar) constantly sneaking out to turn the thermostat up because he’s always cold, and then Mark and Flaps yelling at him because now it’s too hot in their office. This doesn’t factor into the plot at all, but it’s pretty amusing.

Anyway, one night Mark is at a bar with a friend, and this dark-haired German woman named Valerie who has presumably been in there drinking with them comes back inside and tells them her car won’t start. Mark gets up to help, but she insists the other guy should help her, so he toddles out to the parking lot. Valerie starts putting the moves on the guy, but he’s not having it, and shortly after, it’s revealed that Valerie doesn’t even have a car and she just lured this dude outside so she could kill him. Mark and the bartender find the guy dead in the parking lot, with two huge wounds in his chest. The bartender also thinks he sees…something…scuttling away across the ridge, but when he’s asked about it, he sorta clams up.

When the cops arrive, Lieutenant Gully Conti (Vic Morrow) is clearly attempting to minimize the weirdness of the guy’s death, essentially telling the detectives to lie in their reports about how the victim was killed. Mark is suspicious of a cover-up, wondering what on earth Conti is trying to hide.

Shortly after, Mark is approached by Leigh (Donna Mills), the fiancée of the murdered guy. She wants to hire Mark to figure out what really happened, but since the cops are keeping tight-lipped, Mark figures it’s going to be rough going. During the course of his inquiries, though, he discovers that Leigh herself is a person of interest in the crime, since her first husband also died under suspicious circumstances (falling off a cruise ship) some years before. Mark isn’t quite sure what to think, since it would seem that this Valerie woman would be the main suspect, seeing as how she was the last person seen with the victim before he died; but Valerie and Leigh look nothing alike.

Leigh has a fraternal twin sister named Laura (Patty Duke) who lives in a big mansion with Olga (June Allyson), the woman who raised them after their parents died. There’s also a teenage girl named Jennifer (Rosanna Locke) who visits sometimes; at first we’re led to assume this is Laura’s niece, or perhaps another relative or friend of the family. A bit of intrigue is hinted at early on, when Laura goes up to a locked, secret attic room in the mansion and talks to someone we don’t see.

Through various sources, Mark eventually finds out that there were a few other murders in recent years with exactly the same MO as his friend that died, and that those murders were covered up too, leading Mark to assume that Lieutenant Conti knows more about the crimes than he’s letting on.

One evening, Mark takes Leigh out for drinks and dancing, and they meet up with Laura and her fiancé (who I think is named Carlo and is played by Michael DeLano). There’s a very awkward situation when Carlo asks Laura to dance with him, and she says no because the music is “too fast,” so Carlo basically bullies Leigh into dancing with him instead. Mark doesn’t find this strange at all, and Laura just sits there smiling tightly, trying to act like it isn’t bothering her, even though it clearly is. As Carlo and Leigh are dancing, it’s pretty obvious that these two have a history, although Leigh seems somewhat resistant to his aggressive advances.

Later that night, after Mark has dropped Leigh off at her house, Carlo shows up at her door. She seems like she wants him to piss off, but then ends up having sex with him anyway, after which she tells him to GTFO. Carlo ends up dead in his own home the following morning, with the telltale pair of giant chest wounds.

Mark finds out from the coroner that the recent murders, as well as the couple of similar ones the police hushed up, were likely caused by some kind of venom, which given that the name of the movie is Curse of the Black Widow, shouldn’t be too surprising to anyone. A cop named Ragsdale (Max Gail) sympathizes with Mark’s investigation and doesn’t agree with his boss Conti covering up the cause of the killings, so he tells Mark to go see a dude named Popeye (H.B. Haggerty), who witnessed one of the previous murders. After some reluctance, Popeye tells Mark that he saw a giant black widow spider, like the size of a person, but that no one believed him. At this point, Mark doesn’t either, but he has to admit that the case is getting more bizarre by the minute.

Ragsdale says there are lots of Native American and Asian legends about women who turn into giant spiders during the full moon (so werespiders, essentially), and that the large wounds seen on the victims could have been caused by big-ass spider fangs. The more Mark thinks about it, the more he starts to think that’s exactly what’s going on, as unbelievable as it sounds.

He then finds out that Leigh and Laura’s father was killed in a plane crash when the two of them were babies, and that they and their mother had been stranded out in the desert for days before they were rescued. One of the twin babies was so badly bitten by “insects” that she almost didn’t make it. Mark contacts a man who used to work for the family who found the infants in the desert, and though he confirms that one of the girls was indeed bitten by black widow spiders, not insects, he doesn’t know which of the babies it was.

Now, up to this point in the movie, it’s clear that the audience is supposed to suspect Leigh of having something to do with the murders (even though we’ve seen this Valerie lady killing people, and she doesn’t look like Leigh). After all, it’s pretty sketchy that at least two men she was married to/dating turned up dead in the same way, one of whom (Carlo) was killed after she had sex with him and then got mad and told him to scram. There was also a scene earlier in the movie where a big fuzzy tarantula was in her house and she stopped Mark from squishing it, saying she really liked spiders; she just scooped the little guy up in a box and took him outside. The cops, additionally, think she’s involved somehow, pointing out that she always happened to be in town when the murders occurred.

However, Mark isn’t so sure, and not just because he’s taken something of a shine to the beautiful Leigh. Sneakily, he phones up the mansion where Laura and Olga live, and asks Laura if she knows which one of them got bitten by spiders when they were babies. She says she does know, and that it was Leigh. Mark tells Laura that Leigh is on the way to the house right now, and that Laura should pack up and get out because Leigh is probably coming there to kill her. Laura says she will. After Mark hangs up, though, he tells Flaps that he thinks Laura lied, and he’s going out to the house himself.

We see that Laura has actually started to pack, but then she starts convulsing and having multi-eyed visions of the murdered men. It turns out that not only was Laura the werespider all along, but she also had a split personality: Valerie was her alter ego, wearing a dark wig and speaking with a German accent. Laura, it seems, is aware that Valerie takes over and does bad things, but doesn’t seem to be able to control it. And Valerie, acting out Laura’s feelings of jealousy and insecurity stemming from Leigh stealing some of her boyfriends back in the day, indeed turns into a gigantic spider and sucks all the man juice out of her victims. It’s also revealed that in her human form, Laura has a small red hourglass birthmark on her abdomen, just under her belly button.

Leigh arrives at the house and discovers the secret attic room I mentioned earlier. Turns out that Leigh and Laura’s mom, who Leigh thought was dead, is very much alive, but (understandably) lost her mind years ago after seeing Laura turn into a spider. Laura enters the room in her Valerie drag and Leigh doesn’t recognize her at first until she starts giving a villain monologue. It also turns out that Leigh specifically stole Laura’s boyfriend Gianni a long time ago; Laura tried to get Gianni back, but instead he raped her and got her pregnant. She then killed him. So the teenage Jennifer that was calling Laura her aunt is actually her daughter, a fact which will turn out to be significant by the end.

So Laura spiders out, Leigh and Laura’s mom gets yeeted out the window to her death in the melee, and Leigh gets wrapped in webbing and stashed in another building on the property. I think Olga gets killed by the spider around this time as well, after unsuccessfully trying to shoot it.

Mark and Flaps finally show up (it was a long drive, in their defense) and search the abandoned building, finding a fuckton of spiderwebs and many, many dessicated bodies and skeletons of Laura’s victims. Leigh is hanging there in a web and Mark is distraught, thinking she’s already dead, but he sees the webbing moving under her nose and realizes she’s still breathing. He pulls her down, but then spider Laura crashes the party, and although the giant spider prop/puppet here isn’t great, it’s passable, though they probably should have kept to close-up shots because in the longer shots it looks a little cheesy and sort of stiff.

So because Mark was conveniently told earlier that the werespider’s spider form was indestructible except for fire, he hurls a lantern at the big fucker and sets it alight, finally killing it (and burning down the whole-ass house, for good measure).

Some time later, Mark and Leigh are at Leigh’s beach house, preparing to eat lunch out on the patio. Jennifer is also there (presumably Leigh has adopted her), and wants to go for one more swim before they eat. To no one’s surprise, the girl turns toward the camera in her bikini, and we see that she has that telltale red hourglass on her stomach, confirming that she inherited the spider curse from her mother Laura.

This was a really entertaining TV movie from the era; the concept was admittedly odd, but no stranger than most of the stories on the Kolchak shows (and actually less weird than some of those, now that I’m thinking about it). Tony Franciosa came across as a bit of a smarmy creep as Mark, but he was still compelling to watch, and it was great fun seeing all the familiar faces that turned up in this; I’ll also give a particular shoutout to Patty Duke, who was absolutely sensational as Laura/Valerie.

Like I said, the spider prop looked great in tight shots, but some of the sequences toward the end where it was moving around the room on fire looked a tad hokey. I can’t be too mad, though; this was a TV movie, after all, and it was 1977 for fuck’s sake, so it’s not going to look like Stan Winston or Rob Bottin designed and built it.

If you’re into Dan Curtis’s work at all, and especially if you’re a fan of Kolchak, then you will probably dig this; I feel like it’s definitely up there with some of the best TV horror movies of the time, and it’s a shame it’s not better known.

Until next time, keep it creepy, my friends.